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Grand Mental Health has cut the ribbon to open a first-of-its-kind treatment home that offers five to seven days of intensive behavioral health treatment in a fully furnished, equipped and supervised home.
The short-stay therapeutic home is believed to be the first such facility in Oklahoma and possibly the nation.
“We want to accommodate the whole family, not just people, in a less restrictive environment. [We want to] GMH Chief Operating Officer Josh Cantwell said keep the children in their own communities so they don’t get removed and sent hours away where the parents can’t participate in treatment.
“Imagine this, if a 10-year-old has a six-month inpatient stay, that’s 5% of their life lost,” he said.
Bartlesville City Councilman Billy Roane said the new facility is a great asset to Bartlesville.
“A short-stay therapeutic home is helping people after they leave an institution or when they’re having some kind of problem with their family, and the family actually comes in here and they’re monitored,” she said. “They are encouraged, they are given a soft landing place, not just going back to their homes and returning everything to the same issues that were in the first place.”
GMH chose Bartlesville to launch the pilot program because the community has one of the largest populations of children the organization serves and one of the largest inpatient admissions. GMH hopes to have three of these homes in Bartlesville and one in the community they serve.
The home, which will open next month to serve its first family, is expected to help 52 families a year.
In creating the short-stay therapeutic home, Cantwell said they worked backwards on what they wanted to achieve in Bartlesville, which was to reduce the number of children separated from their families, and how to achieve that goal.
GMH’s overall goal is simple: reduce the number of people who commit suicide, Cantwell said. The key to that is greater access to behavioral health services.
“In the 12 counties we serve, 2.6% of people are receiving services with us, and a conservative estimate is that 18 to 23% of people need some type of help for mental health or substance abuse,” Cantwell added.
In addition to the new home, GMH will open a 24-hour crisis center in Bartlesville and provide iPads to their patients, allowing them to connect with a licensed mental health professional 24/7.
According to GMH Chief Clinical Officer Jeff Harlin, the team’s services were launched in 2015. They have snowballed since achieving Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic status in 2017. This allowed GMH to receive federal funding that prioritized outcomes over patient care.
Harlin explained that by moving to a results-based model, the organization will find healthier patients, get more referrals, attract better talent and healthcare professionals, and ultimately generate more funding, so GMH is providing services that work to make the community better.
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